


Merry and Desperate Drought

by sunbreaksdown



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/F, Future Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-29
Updated: 2011-07-29
Packaged: 2017-10-21 22:40:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,144
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/230643
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunbreaksdown/pseuds/sunbreaksdown
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Snapshots of their life together many years on, in which Rose hasn't quite managed to hold everything together as well as she might've.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Merry and Desperate Drought

     The Earth looks different from a distance.

     Flat and smooth and perfect, like someone has taken a file and worn down all the imperfections until their hands were red-raw, and the creases in the landscape that once stood as rivers and valleys are now reflected in their palms. Rose doesn't know who this hypothetical person is. It isn't her; her hands are black, become blacker still with pressure, and while her powers were bestowed upon her by gods, she is not one herself. She is neither creator nor crafter, though she feels that she had or will have some part to play in the reformation of the world thousands of feet below her.

     Even the mountains have been worn down, or perhaps were nothing more than blotches of split paint, grey on the outside, blue and green clustered and cluttered too closely together to discern from such a height; and always in watercolours. She might not have a hand for that sort of thing, but it can't be oil paint because there's no depth to it, doesn't look as if she could press the very tip of her little finger into it at any time and cause the surface to ripple. Less like water, more like smelted ore, always impossibly cool, and she comes to this conclusion because the sea will not be moved. Not by wind or the pull of the moon (the moon is behind Rose, but she imagines that it struggles to no avail), because there are no waves, no ships, no chance of anyone ever drowning, of doing so much as getting their toes wet. Were she closer, Rose could walk on the surface. Could walk on the surface until she stares at it for so long that she sees nothing of herself reflected in it, and begins to think that she was wrong; there was no water there to begin with, much less an entire ocean. There is simply a great void, and no matter whether it is black or blue, the scattered islands float inside it.

     She could reach down and catch the edges of land under her fingernails, and roll them up like sheets of crisp paper still warm from a printer. Always taking care not to get any paper cuts, of course. It is disconcerting, but perhaps that's her purpose. Her role to play on the young Earth which most people regard with the same familiarity as the old Earth. Or the dead Earth, really, because it _was_ old before it died, he and she and they _were_ old on their deathbeds, and being old requires a certain amount of spirit to remain in the stomach and heart. Rose doesn't see why it ought be different for planets. Regardless: that is her role to play. She hears it whispered to her still. She will take the paper islands from one void into another, and then press her fingertips to the edges. Only lightly, at first, as if she does not trust in her own strength, but they will all crumble like a blackened letter in a hearth, touched by the tip of a poker.

     These are all mere observations, naturally. Were she to move closer, Rose has little doubt that the seas would churn, salt would dry on her face, and mountains would remain tall and unaffected by her footfalls, and her impact would amount to little more than footprints in the dry dirt, soon stolen by the wind. It does occur to her then to wonder what's happening; whether she's falling or flying; and concludes it is neither option. She is suspended indefinitely, clinging to a rope with each hand. It only makes sense that the ropes are anchored to the moon, which would explain why it is currently fighting to push and pull at the tide, and though it seems as if Rose is perfectly still, she is struggling. Every last drop of her strength goes into clinging to those twin ropes, though her hands do not turn red with the strain, despite her grasp being as it is, despite any friction.

*

     Upon becoming as she now is, Rose stopped dreaming. Something the gods took from her for what they would deem her own good, and what she often refers to as an entirely squandered opportunity to analyse the inevitably anguished psyche of one having undergone a metamorphosis thus far noted neither in scientific investigation nor the folly of dog-eared science fiction novels. She owns a book, and she keeps that book in her room, under her bed, in a box, and in it, she writes out the finer details of the ludicrous and fantastical images that blur at the edges of her mind and lets herself believe they were born of dreams without a _day-_ prefacing them. Rose studies these all very carefully, annotates what she has written later, when her memory is not so fresh, in a different pen and a different hand, taking it all very seriously. She concludes that she would see herself committed. Somewhere with security, but with a good drainage system and plenty of fresh air, too; her outbursts would be infrequent, but her carers would always dread their inevitable arrival.

     There are, however, flashes of colour when she sleeps. Memories bleeding through like a series of glossy photographs dropped on a tabletop to create one image far greater than the scope of the camera's lens, smeared with a smattering of fingerprints belonging to whoever arranged the photos, but clear enough to make sense of nonetheless. Sometimes, Rose doesn't yet have these memories in her mind, but they are real enough to her. Her heart beats faster. She sleeps for longer on these nights. Four and a half hours, not three. When she wakes up she is alone, and the sun cuts between the curtains, making some slivers of her skin look as if they are all golden lights, not stone.

     She goes outside after these non-dreams, still dressed in her pyjamas, and digs her fingers into the warm soil, letting it catch under her nails. No, she hasn't and won't destroy this world. She's just remembering it all wrong.

*

     Kanaya's been dead for a long time. Over a decade by this point. She seems to handle it well.

     Dead might not actually be the correct term, but alive certainly doesn't fit, either. Kanaya has this knack for blurring the lines between life and death in the same way that her constant glow blurs the lines of her face when Rose is bleary-eyed in the mornings, and after a few years, all of them simply stopped thinking too hard about it. There are small differences, in that Kanaya's heart only very rarely beats, and when it does, it's always somewhere between a faint amusement and a mild nuisance, probably worth comparing to indigestion or a bout of the hiccups. But she still eats and drinks, still breathes in and out when Rose rests her head on her chest, is still wonderfully warm to the touch on a cold winter's evening. No loose pieces of flesh unceremoniously fall from her frame, nor does her eye-socket droop unnecessarily low, as if pulled down by the stench of the dead. Rose supposes it's all very remarkable, but psychology is her field, not biology.

     She's famous in this new world. Or her work is, at the very least; they knew from the very beginning that an alien vampire reminiscent of a night-light wouldn't do very much for business, with or without the horns. And so Jade takes the credit for her designs, and goes to photo shoots for glossy magazines while Kanaya only ever gives interviews over the phone. It isn't a bad set up. It gives Jade something to do in between repetitions of sleeping and blowing things up in the name of science, and the money slowly trickles into Kanaya's bank account, joining up with a stream of royalties from Rose's books, until the two of them are set for the next few years, if nothing else.

     Rose would say that the money doesn't matter to either of them, that it's about being able to do something they love, but it isn't strictly true. Money got them their house with Kanaya's expansive garden and tall white walls all around it, where they have no neighbours to peer in curiously at the leaden girl with her head rested against the shoulder of the one with horns, and the only visitors are always invited beforehand. Kanaya grows a lot of their food, washes the dirt from potatoes at their sink and cuts down corn once it's ripe, and Rose always says, there are grass stains on your knees again, Kanaya, I'm starting to wonder what you're up to.

*

        And from the black they gave me strength to go,  
        From this realm to the depths below.  
        And there I saw the spectrum shift,  
        Saw parts of me long since adrift,  
        And knew I could not hope to win,  
        No matter how I fought the din.  
        No matter how I thorned and scratched,  
        Reached out through silence and I snatched  
        Some speck of light long since gone from me,  
        Like attaining fervid fire from the sea.  
        But there I saw in my own reflection,  
        As if it were a watery dissection,  
        That the darkness did not follow,  
        Did not chase me to some hollow  
        Where the flames gathered in pyres of silk  
        All along some part had know I was their ilk  
        It was me as I was it,  
        Had long since been in the grit,  
        Had long since known it was done,  
        That my fate had since been spun,  
        And from the black they whisper like an ocean,  
        And taint my skin to prove nothing but devotion.

*

     “You're writing poetry again.”

     It is a statement, not a question. Kanaya is too busy preparing her breakfast to beat around the proverbial bush that always roots itself in the centre of their more important conversations and flourishes under the beat of the sun as a leafy monster, obscuring the truth from view. This morning she has strawberry jam on toast (home-grown and handmade, respectively) and a cup of chamomile tea; Rose has cereal and black coffee. Kanaya cuts her two slices into four roughly equal pieces, settles at the table opposite Rose, and waits for an answer before starting on the toast.

     “I always write poetry,” Rose says after a thorough and unnecessary chew of her cereal, not mirroring Kanaya's good manners. Her shoulders tense. Nobody else would notice the minute movement, but Kanaya does.

     “True, I suppose. In your books.” Kanaya says _books_ no matter what part of Rose's professional works she refers to, as if midnight scrawlings on a torn-out page of a notebook is somehow equal to all the parts that are poured into a printed and bound finished product, cover and all. John calls them _stories_ , and she thinks that patronising. “Usually from the perspective of the elusive third person, and often documented as fiction inside of fiction. A historical piece of work that informs the current day of your setting, often strangely relevant to the main character in question and his upcoming exploits. Sometimes you even go as far as to employ your supposed family tradition of irony and pull your character's strings in order to embarrass themselves in an orderly stanza manner. But you do not usually write poetry that involves you, personally.”

     Rose furrows her brow. She looks down at the shiny red surface of the toast, and for a moment Kanaya wonders if she's going to ask her if she plans on consuming it before it turns cold. Rose keeps her lips pursed, looking for another diversion. Kanaya expects her to accuse her of something, of reading her innermost personal expressions, but she herself left the notepad open on the bedside cabinet, and Kanaya knows well enough that it's more of an order than an invitation to indulge herself in the workings of her mind. Rose neither cannot or will not ask for help directly, and even now tries to find a way to wrangle out of the upcoming conversation.

     “If it was prose in the first person you'd found, Kanaya, no matter the subject matter, you wouldn't automatically assume that I'd inserted myself as the narrator. I believe you're taking a running jump to reach a conclusion on the other side of a vast, expansive canyon, with the tattered remains of my poetic license on the jagged floor hundreds of feet below.”

     “Rose. It was oddly specific. Don't attempt to confuse me with talk of deep ravines carved countless centuries ago by rivers. The canyon will not fill with surprise noodles.”

     Rose narrows her eyes as she stares at her, and with a victorious _crunch_ , Kanaya takes the first bite of her toast. Opposite her, Rose scrunches up her face like she's only now realising that she wants milk in her coffee after all, and she looks agonised, like her seat is made from hot irons and strong glue all at once. Kanaya waits patiently, glad that her breakfast is not yet cold.

     “Well,” Rose finally says. “It's not as if I wander the corridors of a night proclaiming Out, damned spot! Out, I say!, believing that these hands ne'er be clean.”

     “Yes, I have read that human play. It is a good one.”

     Kanaya doesn't think that _it could always be worse_ is ever a particularly good reason to ignore any issues at hand, but she doesn't think that she'll ever get through to Rose unless Rose is willing to let down her walls from time to time, either. She sees her, when she doesn't think anyone's watching. When they're all together for a meal and conversation has stolen all of the attention from the room in a flurry of laughter and anecdotes that only become funnier upon repetition. Rose will run her finger across her glass, gathering up the condensation, and then rub it roughly against the side of her thumb, as if trying to rid herself of the black. She'll come back to her senses within half a second or two, and then dig her nail into her skin for the benefit of anyone who may or may not glance her way, as if she merely had an itch to attend to all along.

*

     Nights later and she is closer to the surface of the earth. Perhaps the ropes are there to lower her, rather than purely to stop her from meeting the ground. It is night, pitch-black, and the lights are on, all oranges and whites that look blue when she doesn't focus, making it appear as a map of houses, not the terrain itself. From so high up, everything is perfect, like a scaled-down model of a town or city; Rose can't tell which, can't work out where she is. In the dark, from up above, everything looks the same. Light is light, no matter where she may travel.

     In a few days, in her dreams that aren't dreams, she'll be lowered closer to the ground. Then she'll be able to see all the individual lights for what they are, cars and houses and street lamps and neon signs, but now, they thread together in lines, like branches stripped in the autumn. In her writing, she might describe them as scars on the landscape, but that isn't right; they're too delicate for that. A scalpel wouldn't be precise enough to obtain that sort of detail, and even a blade as thin as a spider's web wouldn't be malleable enough. She thinks they look like capillaries, like the flaps of a dissected frog's fleshed pinned back to show its innards. The color shows through the stretched skin, and Rose wonders how her imagery always drifts back to the clinically grotesque. At least it's sterile.

     It's not so bad, looking at the world like that. She could shatter the lights, but a sense of peace envelops her, even as she clings to the two ropes; she doesn't need to break anything.

*

     Rose sits with her legs crossed as Kanaya works at her sewing machine. The rhythmic _chuck-chuck-chuck_ of the needle and thread is oddly relaxing, broken only by the changing of the bobbin, and she rests her head against Kanaya's shoulder once she's certain she's in the zone. The sewing machine is an old thing by this point, yellowing at the edges and without so much as a single flashing button in sight. Rose tells her that she'll buy her a new one, but Kanaya says she's used to this, but thank you regardless. Watching the hem of the prototype suit grow, Rose is certain that Kanaya can smell the bourbon in her coffee.

     In the room with them are their five cats; Allport, stretched out backwards over a pillow; Kinsey, in a ball at Rose's feet; Maslow, playing with a loose thread Kanaya has discarded; Pavlov and Wolpe, wrestling over ball of yarn in the corner; and Rose says out loud, I think I might be getting better, and maybe it's all happening in reverse. Kanaya, focused on the in-seam, hums to question her, and Rose tells her that she used to dream, once upon a time, and maybe it's happening again. It's been so long that she can't be certain, though, and Kanaya gives her a faint smile, kissing the top of her head. Kanaya's heard it all before, but this time Rose puts her coffee cup down, and so she says, Why don't you tell me about what you saw, Rose?

*

     Like any civilised person, Kanaya eats at the table. The first oddity, however, rests in the fact that the back of her chair is rested against the edge of the table, and there isn't so much as a plate in sight. Without needing to say a word, Rose quickly and quietly crosses the room, places her hands on Kanaya's shoulders, and nestles down in her lap, straddling her. It's been going on for years, but Rose feels as if she'll never truly become accustomed to it. She brushes her short hair back, knowing exactly where Kanaya's going to bite her; she still has the symmetrical scars there.

     Kanaya doesn't have to feed particularly often. Once a week, usually, and never much more than a pint. What a lot of people fail to grasp about vampires, and, indeed, rainbow drinkers, is that blood isn't a food replacement to them. It's something else entirely, serving another function. Rose doesn't know what that is, exactly, but it keeps Kanaya ticking, makes her heart beat from time to time, and so Rose doesn't ask questions. Besides, there's something oddly exciting about it. Her own pulse races when she's pressed against her like this. Generally, it's thought that the pain comes from fangs splitting the skin open, but that's nothing more than a brief scratch that's gone as soon as it's felt. The real discomfort comes from the blood being drawn, but Kanaya has always been so wonderfully _caring_ about it all that Rose can barely comprehend what's happening much of the time.

     Kanaya works slowly, but not so slow that she's dragging things out. Every so often she'll press the pad of her tongue against Rose's throat, feeling where the blood seeps from the twin wounds, making sure the flow isn't too fast, and once she's had her fill, she keep brushing her lips against her skin over and over, until the wound clots over. Rose's head spins the whole time, and she closes her eyes, seeing more colours in the dark than she does on a day to day basis when she looks out of the window, when she takes in this new world. It takes her a minute to two to realise that it's over, to look down at Kanaya and see that she's done. She gives her a weak, warm smile once her vision clears, and then wipes stray drops of blood from the corner of Kanaya's mouth with her thumb, so that she can lick them off.

     Well, Rose says sardonically, At least my blood is still a delectable crimson shade. At least that doesn't change.

*

     At the table again.

     This time, Kanaya has an avocado omelette and green tea; Rose has black coffee.

     Rose sits reading a book, though Kanaya knows she isn't doing so for the story inside. It's research. She's trying to take something from it. Rose does this from time to time, when her own ideas are cooped up inside some blocked off part of her mind, and will scan through pages upon pages for words she doesn't know, for verbs wrapped around nouns in ways that she would've never thought up, and jots them down in a pink notepad. John once asked her why she doesn't just sit and read a dictionary, and Rose explained that it was too deliberate, that she would be drawn towards certain letters, certain word lengths, and that she needs to stumble across these things by accident. Like reverse psychology on her writing block; she's not _looking_ for ideas, she's just reading something new, and if something wormed its way into her brain, well, that would just be inconvenient.

     John says he doesn't get it. Kanaya says that everyone has their own way of doing things.

     “I want to—” Rose begins, voice taut. Kanaya looks up from her omelette, thinking, initially, that Rose is quoting some interesting paragraph she's stumbled across. The two of them read out loud to one another every so often, implementing scenarios of their own, conducting dialogue nobody else will ever hear. “Write. I want to write differently, to have some semblance of a unique style, instantly recognisable but rarely forgotten. I think that's all that people strive for, really. When people pick up my books, they identify the style with more ease than I could hope for, but I see what I write as simply being what I write, without any word wizardry there.”

     “Hmm. I see what you are saying. Sometimes I am under the impression that my clothes are simply clothes.”

     So they're not quoting impromptu passages at one another, in that case.

     “I want to write about vast, unexplored landscapes. The sort at the furtherest end of every land. Naturally, my style – I've now decided that I have one, imagine that – doesn't lend itself to that with much ease. I need something magical, literally, to hook the audience, to keep my own attention. People that I can pour words and imagery and my in-built thesaurus into, because how do I describe an empty field without naming each monocotyledon, without evoking the dreaded full Latin names, as if scientific titles having any baring on an untouched world?”

     That said, Rose returns straight to her book and coffee, as if she hasn't just obtusely bared the soul she often denies having in a way that Kanaya can't quite comprehend. There are a lot of hurdles in this human languages for her to stumble over, and she still has the traces of an alien accent when particularly tired. Mostly, she has trouble with _th_ s. She once told Rose that Vriska would most likely have had the same trouble, what with her fangs, but then never said anything else about her again.

     On her feet, Kanaya moves around the table, kneels at Rose's side, and wraps her arms around her waist. Rose turns another page in her book when Kanaya squeezes her, even though she's yet to finish reading the paragraph she was midway through. She kisses the side of her arm, her shoulder, and then nuzzles her nose against her cheek, making her dull skin glow.

     “You are not as alright as you first thought yourself to be, are you?”

     Rose turns another page.

     “It's complicated, Kanaya,” she eventually murmurs, as if Kanaya hasn't lived with years upon years of complications. “It's not a case of recalling the grimdark process and imagining it in reverse. It's—”

     Another page. Another, and then another.

     Kanaya stands, drags a chair over to Rose's side, takes a seat, and rather unapologetically pulls her into her arms. There are things that happen which neither of them speak of, changes in Rose that she doesn't wish to be explained, like the dark that still sheds from her skin and the fact that some nights she'll awaken and not remember her mother tongue, but they deal with things. That's all there is to it, really. All there is for either one of them to do.

     They'll get used to it, one day. They'll understand what the dreams mean, why the throes persist, but until then, they live with what they have, and they live knowing that they could do without each and every part of it, except for each other.


End file.
